Under Giulia's leadership, the aim is to enhance and broaden the reach of the existing Behavioural Science capabilities within Public Affairs in the UK.
What is "Britishness"? Is there some common national identity that all of us, or most of us, in these islands share? And are there common characteristics which we tend to assume other Britons are likely to have? The question poses itself in the week in which Tony Blair and William Hague, in their own ways, tried to make political capital by appealing to British voters' instincts of national identity.
If the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, had time to glance at the Guardian on the morning of Budget Day, perhaps as he ate the frugal breakfast the price of which he apparently had to borrow from a colleague, it might just have raised a smile. For there, in ICM's poll, the mass of the public were saying they wanted him to do very much what he was proposing to announce that he would do. Most of them wanted him to use any spare cash to help the Health Service, and more than half thought a rise in duty on tobacco was the most acceptable tax.
So, the Conservatives have comfortably gained Ayr from Labour in the first by-election to the Scottish Parliament
(as the polls suggested they would! - ICM/Scotsman poll, Scottish Opinion/Daily Record poll), with Labour convincingly beaten into third by the Scottish National Party, and their Liberal Democrat coalition partners slipping to fifth behind the Scottish Socialist Party. What, if anything, are the wider implications for Labour, and for the Tories?
"POLL SHOCK: VOTERS TO GIVE DEWAR A BLOODY NOSE. LABOUR FACE AYR CRASH - EXCLUSIVE BY RON MACKENNA" screams the front page of yesterday's Daily Record, Scotland's highest circulation daily newspaper. It certainly shocked me - but it was the accuracy of the reporting, not the data in the poll (a constituency poll by Scottish Opinion Limited ahead of next week's Ayr by-election) that was disturbing.
The Labour Party (or, to be precise, the Labour Representation Committee as it then was) was founded a hundred years ago this week. The driving force behind the LRC's foundation was the trade union movement, with the intention of getting working men into Parliament, and thereby better to represent working class voters.
In ten weeks' time, in theory, Londoners should be voting for their first directly-elected mayor. Even that is uncertain: because the House of Lords has blocked the passage of the regulations that will govern the contest, there is even the possibility that it may have to be postponed altogether. If so, it would be a final indignity in keeping with the shambles which has pervaded all aspects of the proceedings up to now.
The Daily Telegraph's lead editorial on 14 February, argued on the basis of recent Conservative successes in local government by-elections that the Conservatives are in a much stronger position than current opinion polls suggest.
A series of polls, first in Scotland where controversy initially arose, and subsequently across the whole of Great Britain, have made it clear that public opinion on Section 28 of the Local Government Act, on the age of consent for homosexual sex, and more generally on attitudes to homosexuality, are by no means as simple or as clear cut as some of those on either side of the argument would like to believe. On the one hand, there is a clear majority of the public opposed both to repealing Section 28 and to lowering the age of consent to 16; but, on the other hand, many of these opponents are happy to admit the legitimacy of homosexual relationships between adults.
